Rep. Lamar Smith

A bill being pushed by Rep. Lamar Smith that would give the federal government greater power to detain immigrants for much longer periods of time is not only constitutionally suspect, but poor public policy, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ahilan Arulanantham tells ACSblog.

Arulanantham, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, chatted with ACSblog about Smith’s bill, H.R. 1932, following his appearance earlier this week before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement to present testimony on the measure.

“The bill would vastly expand the federal government’s ability to detain noncitizens – for months, sometimes years, while their cases are pending in the immigration courts and then on review in the federal courts,” Arulanantham told ACSblog. “And those portions of the bill actually apply to people who have never been convicted of crimes. As it turns out, about half of the people in the nation’s immigration centers have no criminal convictions at all.”

The measure, he continued, would also allow indefinite, possibly permanent detention, of certain noncitizens who can’t be deported to their countries.

Apart from the measure’s serious affronts to the Constitution, Arulanantham said it amounts to “extremely bad policy.” He noted that it costs tens of thousands of dollars per detainee, per year to imprison people in immigration detention facilities. The vast majority of those being detained have no criminal records, pose no risk of flight and yet this measure, if enacted, would drain resources from an already strapped federal government.